Prediction: Penny Dreadful (NSFW, NSFK)

We recommend checking your surroundings and the people occupying them before pressing play on this one, kids, as well as your own sensibilities. This is a Showtime project, thusly, even the trailer has sex and blood in spades.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Shiri’s Prediction: I am both totally grossed out and intrigued. While a fan of horror, I don’t much care for torture, so the brief glimpses of iron maidens and surgeons’ tables make me a little squidgy. That said, the show appears to be taking its model from the original concept of the penny dreadful but for it being visual programming rather than printed horror stories and the harkening back to earlier horror tradition is pretty cool. You know. Back when it was scary. Some of the major players in Penny Dreadful, appear to be Dorian Gray, Doctor Frankenstein, and assorted characters from Dracula, all woven together in serial fashion, another nod to the literary past. Also, Timothy freakin’ Dalton. These characters have, of course, been done to death (I just punned myself by accident. *facepalm*) but returning them to their proper temporal settings and basic origins could be fantastic. Could be. Provided that the expositions on Ptolemy and the absolutely no plot for 150 pages things are dumped in favor of character development and, well, plot.

As a lover of things Anglo and Irish, British written history meeting a Dublin location definitely rings my bells. I plan to give it a try, iron maidens and all. And when I’m awake at 0200 tweeting random, gruesome things, you’ll know what to blame.

Luke’s Prediction: Where are they going here? This could be another messy train wreck like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where they take a bunch of stories all nominally from the same period and attempt to smash them all together, though this looks more like the supernatural subset of the Victorian era.

Or it could be a fun reimagining of those characters, playing with their origins just enough to have them cross and intertwine in an interesting way.

Timothy Dalton has gone from being a very intense Bond to a someone who not just chews on the scenery, but gobbles it up wholesale.

I would look up some of the articles that have more details, but the preview leaves me really blah. Looks all style and no story. Might check it out when it debuts, but not expecting much.

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Shiri Sondheimer

Bloginatrix and disembodied voice at The Last Chance Salon (lastchancepod.com). RN at the Department of Therapeutic Misadventures. Currently at work on Hero Handlers (Spring '15).

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